eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

February 2013

02/27/2013

Liberal Arts is a
movie about phase transitions in life. It is about calibrating the inner and
outer lives and going through the messy process of becoming Velveteen Rabbits.

The main character “was an English major with a minor in
history just to make sure that [he] was fully unemployable.” And he reads a lot.
“The purpose of fiction is to combat loneliness’” he comments at one point,
reflecting on how, ten years out of college, he feels that he has somewhat lost
his way as a college admissions counselor. It is pretty clear that he is too
busy reading to notice the opportunities in his path. “All the choices you had
in front of you are no longer there,” he reflects on the transition from
college to real life, not realizing just how many choices he is missing because
his nose is in a book. It is no wonder that he feels drawn back to the college
he left and to a young woman he meets there. She is 16 years younger than he is
but claims that age differences are irrelevant if you consider the possibility
that we are all reincarnated. One suspects that there was a part of college
that he missed while he was at college and he is going back there to replay it
while there is something in her “old soul” that cannot find nourishment in the
men that she goes to school with. His old English professor is just retiring
and going through the trauma of occupational dislocation. “Nobody feels like an
adult,” he says, “It’s the world’s dirty secret.”

Ultimately I suppose, everyone in
this world has to grow up sometime or go back to where they did not grow up and
start there till they get to where they leapfrogged to. Much as we would like
to take shortcuts to doing so, we don’t get to skip over parts of life. And eventually, we have to put the fiction
books down and remember that reading about life can take away the time we need to
actually live life.Ultimately, everyone in the movie who matters comes to realize that in the end, there is no escaping from the living of your life. and maybe there shouldn't be any really good reason not to.

Question for Comment:
Have there been phases of the life cycle that you skipped or that you need to
go back and do right?

02/23/2013

Ayn Rand, Introducing Objectivism - “Man—every man—is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others; he
must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor
sacrificing others to himself; he must work for his rational self-interest,
with the achievement of his own happiness as the highest moral purpose of his
life.”

Paul, Letter to the Philippians - “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility
consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to
your own interests, but also to the interests of others.”

Joe
Garner decides to conduct an experiment that essentially tests whether or not
Ayn Rand or Paul have the upper hand in American society today. He cuts himself
off from all his friends and family, leaves all his money and possessions
behind (with the exception of his new phone and a laptop) and sets out to live (for
a month) off the connections he can make on Craigslist. He finds a cameraman on
Craigslist to follow him around for that month and the rest is … well history.

“Some say we have lost the sense of community that used to
carry us through tough times,” he speculates in the opening scene and proves conclusively
in the course of the month that this is not entirely so. His story is a story of dozens of people
willing to share, to help, to take him in. Some of them, granted, seem dubious.
Some seem borderline crazy. By the time you are done you realize that most of
the people who help people in the margins are, in some way, people in the
margins themselves. Often he is helped by people in need of help.Perhaps they best understand the need to keep the Good Samaritan story alive in the hearts of the community that they struggle to succeed in.

I would love to see someone do a
follow up and find out just why each of the people who volunteered to help him
along the way did what they did for an “angel unaware.”

02/16/2013

“The Wildest Thoughts,
Passionate, abysmal and forbidden. Against reason, against rationality. Against
the rules. To passion. To sturm and drink.”

Johann Goethe was 24 when he wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther. It was the
book that launched him into Harry Potter like immortality out of nowhere. Young Goethe in Love is a romanticized
retelling of the story that brought the book about. (Is it possible to
romanticize the classic novel of Romanticism? It almost seems like trying to
turbo-charge a jet engine or to add spice to a jalapeno pepper). Later in his
life, Goethe denounced the Romantic movement that his book so enthusiastically
championed by calling it "everything that is sick.” Perhaps in he came to
believe that in healthy societies, people only kill themselves for principle or
patriotism?

In Werther, Goethe
appears to have captured the essence of what it feels like to come in third in
a love triangle. And the film Goethe in Love
tries to capture the essence of the experience by which he captured that
essence. As Lotte says of Goethe’s story at the end of the film, “It is more
than truth. It is poetry.” She understands that people cannot always do what
their hearts would like them to do. “My heart is not in it,” Lotte explains to
her father of her engagement to the husband he has chosen for her. “You’ll get
over that in time,” he assures her. There is tragedy in that assertion and
there is wisdom. Each person must only look into their own heart to decide if it
is true (“This Goethe, she can’t forget him”). For those who never do “get over”
some past love, there must be imagination. To compensate, they must have art –
literature – and music. And thus, Lotte
tells Goethe in his prison cell, “the two of them will stay together not in
truth but in poetry” and hope that the result is not, as Lotte fears, “a wholly
botched life.”

In Goethe’s book, Werther concludes that one of the
three people caught up in the tragedy must die. He loves Lotte too much to want
her to. He cannot see himself murdering Albert. Logic demands that he shoot
himself (with his pistols sent by her hand to make the death unforgettable).
Cause of death; “Morbus Melancholicus.”

Ultimately, The
Sorrows of Young Werther was a correction to the Enlightenment idea that we
are, and should be, our minds and that living from that part of our
personalities that houses the soul, the passions, the intuitions, the emotions,
and the mysteries is the cause of all our troubles. This new Romanticism gave
people back permission to be their crazy old pre-Enlightenment selves again and
they loved Goethe for celebrating their emancipation. “The whole thing is embarrassing,”
says an elderly gentleman in the film as Goethe’s book vaults him into international
acclaim, “The tendency for feelings is a virus that has infected young people
everywhere. Reason is on the retreat. Old virtues are fading everywhere.”

Was this good? Was this bad? If you have ever been
in love, you know the answer to that question.

Question
for Comment: Johan Goethe was able to turn a broken
heart that made him want to shoot himself in the head with a pistol into a life
of artistic success. Is there some secret to benefitting from a broken heart?
Or is that just a gift that some heartbreaks get in the lottery of life?

02/11/2013

Greed is not necessarily criminal; fraud is not necessarily
provable; and Justice is not necessarily blind. That is what you will learn
from this expose on how it came to be that a half dozen banks were able to sell
off mortgage backed investments for fillet minion that they knew were made out
of gristle and roadkill meat.

So, lets say I am a Wall Street Bank CEO (yeah. I know it is
a stretch.) I am making money hand over fist selling mortgage backed securities.
I know I can make money at it because people can be depended on to pay their
mortgages, right? I mean, who would take out a loan that they could not afford
and not pay it off, right? Surely, no sane person would contract a loan, put up
collateral, and lie on their asset statements to get said loan knowing that
they could loose their house if they did not pay off their mortgages, right?

But then, the due diligence firm that I hire to examine
those mortgages starts telling me that 50% of the mortgages that they are
looking at seem “odd” to them … fail to meet the standards I have set for an
acceptable mortgage. What do I do? Do I lower the standards so that the loans
can keep coming down the pipeline because I know I have buyers for them? Do I
put pressure on the accrediting agencies to keep giving me AAA ratings on the
investments I am packaging when I know that they are high risk at best and
worthless at worst? One might as well pose the question this way; Lets say I am
the manager of a KFC and I get a shipment of chicken loaded with salmonella. Do
I sell it because the customers are hungry and have money? What would happen to
a restaurant manager who sold chicken sandwiches he knew were loaded with
pathogens (Ok, lets say that he knew that half his chicken was)?

What sort of excuses might I make if I were such a restaurant
manager or such a bank CEO? I might say “I can’t be blamed. The chicken got the
disease on the farm. Not in my restaurant.” I might say, “We warn our customers
that they are taking a some sort of vague risk when they buy the sandwich.” I
might say, “You wouldn’t want to bring an entire restaurant chain down for what
could be arguably seen as a human error, would you? Are we not too big to fail?”
I might say “Well, all the FBI agents are spending their time looking for
terrorists now so I can’t be blamed for what I do to the American people when
God knows I could not do it if I were properly regulated.”

And these people took tax-payer bailout money and used it to
pay themselves bonuses.

Bi-partisan hat’s off to Frontline for this one.They have not left either party unscathed. They have taken Bush to the woodshed for not regulating these robber barons previously. The aim of this piece is to take Obama to the woodshed for not prosecuting them. Or trying to. But I have no doubt that there is some truth in the excuses. I have no doubt that the guys at the top simply give quotas to the minions below them, knowing that those minions will have to shave their ethical standards down to "sub-gutter" to reach them. What fool smart enough to become a CEO of Bear Strens is going to write it all out in a memo. Sigh.

Question for Comment:
I asked my Civics class today the following question: “If you got paid $1000 for
something but it was in cash under the table, would you declare it and pay
taxes on it?” What do you think they said?

02/10/2013

“I was born for a storm and a calm does
not suit me.” - Andrew Jackson.

“A barbarian who could not write a sentence
of grammar” - John Quincy Adams on Andrew
Jackson.

Jon Meacham’s Jackson, like his
biography of Thomas Jefferson, is the tale of a great President, not always of
a good one. In Adolph Hitler’s critique of democracy (Mein Kampf), the dictator insisted that the people were incapable
of identifying a great leader.

“By
rejecting the authority of the individual and replacing it by the numbers of
some momentary mob, the parliamentary principle of majority rule sins against
the basic aristocratic principle of Nature . . . Does anyone believe that the
progress of this world springs from the mind of majorities and not from the
brains of individuals? . . . For there is one thing which we must never forget:
in this, too, the majority can never replace the man. It is not only a
representative of stupidity, but of cowardice as well. And no more than a
hundred empty heads make one wise man will an heroic decision arise from a
hundred cowards. . . . Sooner will a camel pass through a needle's eye than a
great man be ' discovered' by an election. The progress and culture of humanity
are not a product of the majority, but rest exclusively on the genius and
energy of the personality.”

Paradoxically, Meacham’s portrait of
Andrew Jackson both proves and disproves his point. In many ways, Andrew
Jackson was “the people’s dictator” – aggregating to himself more power than
any President before him had ever accumulated – but always claiming to do so on
behalf of and as a representative of, “the people.” “The ordinary, the
unconnected, the uneducated;” These were his primary concern.

Jackson clearly enjoyed using power. “Providence
may change me,” he said once, “but it is not in the power of a man to do it.” The
fact that he was extremely popular made it easy to argue that popularity is what
entitled a person to use it. What arises from the story of his Presidency is
that Jackson was always willing to use power to support the majority against
the minority when the majority opinion reflected his own opinion. He was also
quite willing at times to use his power for the minority when he found himself
in it. “God’s was the only will that Jackson ever bowed to,” writes Meacham, “and
he did not do even that without a fight.” “Like Lincoln later,” Meacham
insists, “he would use autocracy to protect democracy” and yet, as the story he
tells makes clear, he would also use autocracy to obstruct democracy.

Some examples may suffice.

The
Spoils System:
When Jackson came into office, he replaced about 10% of the Federal Bureaucracy.
Jackson was the first President to remake the government on such a large scale.
“He wanted a political culture where the people chose the President and the
President chose the government.” Naturally, those in offices that lost them to
Jackson’s men saw this as a diabolical misuse of power. (I never liked the President
of the college who failed to rehire me.) But Jackson’s argument was that the
government was not the personal business of the people who presently collected
pay checks from it. It was the sole possession of the people who it was to be run
for. And if his opponents wanted “their
men” in power, they would just have to vote them back in.

Internal
Improvements: One
of the most important bills to come to the desk of Andrew Jackson was the bill
approving the funding of internal improvements like the Maysville Road. American
business interests wanted the Federal government to pick up the tab for the
building of ports, roads, and canals. Naturally this expenditure would be borne
by the majority and would primarily benefit the few (the people who would make
money from those improvements.) Jackson vetoed the bill, insisting that the
resources of the Federal government were not, in his administration, to be put
at the disposal of a select few people or States for their own personal
benefit.

Jackson
was willing to “approve interstate projects” but asserted the right to veto
anything that “does not cross state lines.” Jackson insisted that the people
would prefer to pay off the National debt before using the nation’s money for
the aggrandizement of a few speculators and factory owners. “By crushing Maysville
he was distinguishing between national and local projects,” Meacham argues. He and
not anyone else would decide what improvements would pass and thus Jackson would
be free to decide on individual bills as he chose. Clearly, this would give him
leverage in any political battle he might have over any future legislation. His
assertions to power over such Federal expenditures significantly increased the
powers of his office.

Cherokee
Removal:
Early on in America’s history, the Federal government (under George Washington)
had concluded treaties with the Cherokee Indians, guaranteeing them boundaries
and national sovereignty. Unfortunately for the Cherokee, those boundaries fell
within the state of Georgia who did not agree that such a promise should be
paramount to their own vision for the land. Georgia insisted that the Cherokee
accept a Federal “offer” to relocate west of the Mississippi or, failing to do
so, accept eviction by the State’s militia. A good portion of American society
saw nothing but evil in a policy that would place a State’s interest above
principle and fidelity to national treaties (the Supreme Court spoke for them
quite eloquently).

New Jersey Senator Frelinghuysen put the
issue most succinctly in his argument against the Cherokee removal. “The truth is, we have long been gradually, and almost
unconsciously, declining into these devious ways,” he said of American encroachments
upon lands protected by Federal treaties, “and we shall inflict lasting injury
upon our good name, unless we speedily abandon them.”

"And here,
Mr. President, I insist that, by immemorial possession, as the original tenants
of the soil, they hold a title beyond and superior to the British crown and her
colonies, and to all adverse pretensions of our confederation and subsequent
Union:- God, in his Providence, planted these tribes on this Western continent,
so far as we know, before Great Britain herself had a political existence. I
believe, Sir, it is not now seriously denied that the Indians are men, endowed
with kindred faculties and powers with ourselves; that they have a place in
human sympathy, and are justly entitled to a share in the common bounties of a
benignant Providence. And, with this conceded, I ask in what code of the law of
nations, or by what process of abstract deduction, their rights have been
extinguished?

Where is the decree or ordinance that has stripped these
early and first lords of the soil? Sir, no record of such measure can be found.”

Do the obligations of justice change with the color of the
skins? Is it one of the prerogatives of the white man, that he may disregard
the dictates of moral principles, when an Indian shall be concerned? No

But Andrew Jackson was a leader of a
people, not a leader of the most principled members of that people. And the
people wanted – nay needed – indeed had a right to Indian land in their own
minds and Jackson was a man of the people. “As long as the government heeds the
popular will the Republic will be safe,” Jackson insisted, ignoring the
security needs of the entire Cherokee Nation while promising to protect them in
their new lands west of the Mississippi forever (How did that turn out?) Jackson
makes a feeble effort to consider the moral implications of taking treaty-guaranteed
land from native peoples but quickly disposes of the dilemma (“Our conduct towards these people is deeply interesting to
our national character. . . . It is too late to inquire … that step cannot be
retraced …”) “In the hierarchy of Jackson’s concerns,” writes Meacham, “the
sanctity of the Union outranked any other consideration. “There is nothing
redemptive about Jackson’s Indian policy,” he continues, “Not all great
presidents are good.”

In
the case of the Indian removal policy of Andrew Jackson, the rulers of the
people had truly become their servants. Ironically,
when
the French government voted to not pay off a treaty debt to the American government
during his presidency, Jackson was furious. The violation of treaties felt
differently as a victim than it had as a victimizer. “The human capacity to
convince oneself of something one wants to think true is virtually bottomless,”
Meacham observes, “Given facts such as Indian removal, it has to be.”

The
National Bank:
Perhaps one of the great defining moments of the Jackson Presidency is his
decision to veto the re-chartering of the United States Bank. The U.S. Bank,
brainchild of Alexander Hamilton, was a private bank that housed and lent out
all of the Federal government’s money. A small group of talented financiers
would use the money to provide loans to the sorts of people who had already
proven that they knew how to make money with money (i.e. their rich friends mostly).
Jackson was convinced that the Bank of the United States was using the people’s
money to pad the comfortable lives of the nation’s economic elites. He was also
convinced that its President, Nicholas Biddle, was using the money to buy
electoral control of the United States House of Representatives and Senate and
thus he set out to kill it. And if those well-greased Senators and Congressmen
objected, doom on them. “Jackson took the Jeffersonian vision of the centrality
of the people further,” says Meacham, “and he took Jefferson’s view of the role
of the President further still.” He had the Constitutional power to veto
legislation and he had no qualms about using it.

“He was very much against the special
deal or the selfish purpose” insists Meacham. He was intent on dismantling the Federalist
establishment that used its majority power within powerful institutions like the
Supreme Court and the Bank of the United States. The National Bank was an
institution that held the public’s money but was not subject to the people’s
will or to the President’s. Jackson would not tolerate such a state of things. “The
hydra of corruption is only scotched not dead” he said of the bank after
refusing to re-charter it and had began to lay plans for removing Federal monies
from it. Since he was the people’s President, he argued that he had the right
to decide who would control what the people’s money would be used for.

In his veto message he stated his
intention to “better the lives of the many. Not
reward the few.”

“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend
the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will
always exist under every just government. Equality of talents of education or
of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of
the gifts of heaven and the fruits of superior industry economy and virtue, every
man is equally entitled to protection by law but when the laws undertake to add
to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions - to grant titles,
gratuities and exclusive privileges to make the rich richer and the potent more
powerful, the humble members of society; the farmers, mechanics and laborers
who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves
have a right to complain of the injustice of their government. There are no necessary
evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses. If it would confine
itself to equal protections and as heaven does its rains, shower its favors
alike on the high and the low, the rich and the poor, it would be an
unqualified blessing.”

“The force driving Jackson after 1824,”
writes Meacham, was “a belief in the primacy of the will of the people over the
whim of the powerful with himself as the chief interpreter and enactor of that
will.” His decision would severely threaten
the fortunes of the elites. Without the national money in their bank, Nicholas
Biddle Inc. would not have the great advantages that it had been parlaying into
personal fortunes. Biddle, pressed against the wall, retaliated by calling in
loans all over the country and creating a major panic that he believed would
convince the majority to rethink their support of Jackson.

Had
not Jackson had effective control of many of the nation’s newspapers, it might have
succeeded.

Nullification
and the Force Bill:
Tarriffs were the principle means by which the Federal government funded
itself. It was also a mechanism for protecting local industries, often at the
expense of consumers. States that were high consumers and anemic manufacturers
essentially found themselves paying out more for their products so that other
regions of the country could charge them more for them. South Carolina was the
principle “victim” (or saw itself as such). They believed that the high tariffs
left the British merchants that bought their agricultural products with little
money to spend. In time, South Carolina’s position, as articulated by Jackson’s
arch enemy John C. Calhoun, was that a State had a right to nullify a Federal
law, essentially refusing to collect impost taxes in their harbors.

Jackson was a fanatic for “unionism” (it
would be hard not to be if you were the head of that Union) and saw the
doctrine of nullification as murderer’s knife to his country. “It is an infirmity of our nature to mingle our interests
and prejudices with the operations of our reasoning powers” Jackson says of the
tariff, asserting that South Carolina’s objections to the tariff were not
entirely based on rationality. If South Carolina tried to nullify Federal laws,
Jackson insisted, he would see to it that the imposts duties were collected on
ships before entering the harbor. And he would use force against them if they
objected.

Ironically,
in the case of Georgia’s resistance to the Supreme Court’s ruling on the
Cherokee matter, Jackson had taken the side of the State. In the issue of the
S.C. Tariff, he reversed himself. “Jackson was a politician not a philosopher,”
writes Meacham, “and politicians generally value power over strict intellectual
consistency.” He could personally defy a Federal Court order … but S.C. dare
not try something similar after he
had spoken. Jackson did nothing against Georgia that he contemplated when
responding to South Carolina. “As usual, Jackson did what he liked.”

The
U.S. Mails:
You can see a similar inconsistency in the conflict over abolitionist literature
in the U.S. mails. When Northern abolitionists began to publish pamphlets and mail
them to South Carolina, the State intercepted them and refused to distribute
them. In effect, this was a “nullification” of Federal law as much as the
refusal to collect Federal taxes in their harbor. But on this issue, Andrew Jackson
was anything but a disinterested bystander. He had his own plantation in
Tennessee to worry about and he did not take kindly to abolitionists using
their free speech and the mail system that he controlled. “If Jackson had been
a President of consistent principle,” says Meacham, “the issue would have been
clear. . . . Jackson spoke as a planter. Not a President.”

There is a certain irony to the fact
that Andrew Jackson, the man who always liked to argue that he was the mob’s President,
began to feel the dangers in an excess application of his own theory in this
case. “This spirit of mob law is becoming too common and must be checked,” he
said of the mobs in S. Carolina.

Precisely what his political opponents
had been saying about him.

The
Eaton Affair:
“The enemies of the general have dipped their arrows in wormwood and gall and
sped them at me,” Andrew Jackson’s wife Rachel Jackson asserted in the brutal
campaign that brought Jackson to office. She died after the election but before
Jackson took office. Jackson would never forget the slanders that had been
leveled against her and when similar accusations were made about the wife of
his Secretary of War, John Eaton, Jackson came to her reputation’s rescue. When
the wives of other government officials began to refuse to associate with
Margaret Eaton, Jackson circled the wagons and began firing them. “To
acknowledge the Eatons was to side with Jackson.” Her virtue was not something
that Jackson would allow to be submitted to a vote of the people.

“Ladies wars are always fierce and hot.”
Louisa Adams (wife of former President John Quincy Adams commented).

The
Veto and the Executive Power: The
six Presidents previous to Andrew Jackson vetoed nine bills. Jackson vetoed a
dozen. Presidents before Jackson saw the legislature as the pre-eminent power. They
saw themselves as executors of the legislative will. They used their
Presidential powers to try and influence that legislation but they rarely
defied it. Jackson saw himself as more powerful and his job as being on par
with the legislative branch’s even in the field of law. He was, he argued, the
embodiment of the people. Congress should consult with the President before
sending legislation down to him to sign, he insisted. And if they did not, they
had no one to blame but themselves when he vetoed their bills.

It is no wonder that the enemies he made
in the legislative branch were ferocious in their criticisms of him. “He [Henry
Clay] for one could not see how killing 2500 Englishmen at New Orleans qualified
for the difficult and complicated business of the chief magistracy,” notes the
author. To Clay, Jackson was “the basest meanest scoundrel that ever disgraced
the image of his God.”

Jackson’s central innovation was his
assertion that each branch of Government had a moral obligation to interpret
the Constitution that they had sworn to uphold. “Incompatible
with my sense of duty under the Constitution” Jackson would have said about the
Act establishing a day of fasting. “The Congress, the executive and the Court
must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the constitution,” he
insisted in his veto message on the chartering of the U.S. Bank.

“Each public officer who takes an oath to support the
Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it and not as it
is understood by others. . . . The opinion of the judges has no more authority over
Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point
the president is independent of both."

Jackson had made it clear that he was
bound to interpret the laws as he understood them, not as the Supreme Court
understood them or Congress understood them. Given the fact that his branch of
government controlled the actual military that could be used to back up an
interpretation, it is not difficult to see why his political opponents saw in
this assertion, a return to something akin to monarchy. “The President is the
direct representative of the people.” Jackson argued when he claimed to have the
right to decide what banks would receive Federal monies.

“What effrontery” said Calhoun, noting
astutely that this power would give Jackson the same powers to influence
elections as Nicholas Biddle had been using. The government’s money, he
insisted, could be used as a “permanent electioneering engine” for Jackson’s
party as easily as it could for Biddle’s. With the power over the Nation’s
money added to his power over the military and Jackson’s growing assertions to
power over the regulatory power of Congress, there would be little left for the
Congress and Senate and Courts to occupy themselves with.

“The people sir, are with me.” Jackson would
have characteristically responded.

“History has been ransacked to find
examples to find examples of tyrants sufficiently odious to illustrate him by
comparison,” said Jackson’s defender in the Senate, Thomas Benton.

“Language has
been tortured to find Epithets sufficiently strong to paint him in description.
Imagination has been exhausted to deck him with revolting and inhuman
attributes.”

Jon Meacham has
done us a service in helping us to gain a more nuanced portrait of America’s
seventh President. For good or bad, Andrew Jackson redefined the rules for
American Presidents. He is the first President to take his campaign for office
directly to the people (it was previously thought bad form to do so instead of
letting others campaign for you.). Andrew Jackson was the first President to
insist that his power to interpret the Constitution was coequal with the powers
of the court. Andrew Jackson was the first President to hire and manage his own
public relations campaign while in office, availing himself of his “own” paper
to bring his message directly to the people instead of using the State of the
Union Address to make his case to their representatives. Andrew Jackson was the
first President to begin insisting that Congress bring its proposed bills to
him for consideration before passing
them.

Perhaps most
importantly, Andrew Jackson was the first President to assert (perhaps with
good reason) that his powers were justifiably rooted in direct democracy.
Though elected by electors, Jackson created the impression that some sort of
evil was being done when the people did not get their way and that the rich
were not entirely the people that the Constitution had set out to benefit. That
was his essential narrative and he never backed down from it even when his
actions contradicted it.

Question for Comment: One of Jackson’s
favorite stories, Meacham notes, was the story of Telemachus, a Greek ruler who
is advised to govern in the people’s best interest whether they recognize and
appreciate that or not. Following is a passage from the play that Meacham quotes
at length.

“Mentor replied to him patiently: “You must count on the
ingratitude of mankind, and yet not be discouraged by it from doing good: you
must study their welfare, not so much for their own sakes, as for the sake of
the gods, who have commanded it. The good that one does is never lost; if men
forget it, the gods will remember and reward it. Further, if the bulk of mankind
are ungrateful, there are always some good men who will have a due sense of
your virtue. Even the multitude, though fickle and capricious, does not fail
sooner or later to do justice, in some measure, to true virtue.”

Do you think
that a President should make decisions on the basis of what the people want? Or
on what they should want?

02/09/2013

I remember watching a movie a few years ago about
two people falling in love while doing research on a Victorian era poet
(Posession starring Aaron Eckhart and Gwineth Paltrow). Mr. and Mrs. Prince reminds me somewhat of the film in that the
author and her husband have obviously demonstrated the power of a shared love
of the past upon a present relationship. Gretchen Holbrook Grezina’s story of
her and her husband’s search into the life of Abijah and Lucy Prince sparkles
with all the delightful serendipity of doing historical research in Vermont. (“Serendipity
means a "happy accident" or "pleasant surprise";
specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful while not
specifically searching for it.”)

“We sat like twins who
shared a secret language as we pored over them [old papers, letters, account
books, ledgers, tax lists, land records, court dockets, church records,
probates, newspapers, sermons, petitions, journals, etc.) often with no luck,
but sometimes unearthing nuggets of information that utterly changed the story
of the Princes. When we worked apart, our first greeting in the evening was
always “Did you find anything today?” usually followed by “Can you make out
this word?”

Working together almost
became a competition, but an unfair one because nowadays it was always Anthony
who made the discovery. We would seat ourselves in a library, a stack of
materials in front of us, and divide things up. Inevitably I handed him the
very item that ended up containing the surprise. Or I would wave my hand
towards a bookshelf and say, “There might be something in there,” and he’s gaze
for a moment, pick up a book seemingly at random, then open to the only page
that held what we needed. I finally conceded that it was less a knack than some
sort of research fairy that guided him, even when I slapped the table and
asserted that it had been my turn to make a find.”

“There is something confounding about standing in the
houses left behind by those we wish we could have met,” Gerzina writes of
standing in the home where Lucy grew up as a slave in Deerfield, Massachusetts.
The story of how Abijah Prince gained
his freedom and set out to establish himself in colonial Massachusetts and
Vermont, how he married and obtained freedom for his wife, Lucy Terry, and how
he fought back in the courts when bigots objected to his success gives the
reader a fascinating window into the lives of enslaved and free black people in
colonial New England. Like the lives of the people they are researching, the
Garzina’s are forced to deal with obstacles, dead-ends, opposition, help, lucky
breaks, surprises, unmet expectations, and victories. Both couples achieve
great things by their sheer perseverance.

My three cornered hat is off to the Princes and to
the authors of Mr. and Mrs. Prince
who have resurrected them and their lives from this labor of love.

Question
for Comment: Who would you research if you had a
year off to write a book about someone in the past?

02/08/2013

This is the story of Atlas Shrugged as told by those who are fans of its message. In
short, it is the history of the “Maker-Taker” argument in American life from
the perspective of those who see themselves as makers. ”Identify the dominant
philosophy of a society,” Ayn Rand once said, “and you can predict its future.”
Atlas Shrugged is, in a sense, a prophecy of a day when the “makers” go on
strike and the takers suffer their comeuppance for driving them away. Ayn Rand and the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged
links the novel to the experience of those who see in contemporary events, the fulfillment
of her prophetic predictions.

Ayn Rand insists that men must use their minds to
determine their choices and that when they do so, they will always choose to
pursue their own rational self-interest. She denies the right of either the
materialists (who threaten your body) or the mystics (who threaten your soul)
to require you to act “irrationally (i.e. altruistically). “To force a man to
drop his own mind and to accept your will as a substitute,” she writes,

“with a gun in place of
a syllogism, with terror in place of proof, and death as the final argument—is
to attempt to exist in defiance of reality. Reality demands of man that he act
for his own rational interest; your gun [or your religion or your communism] demands
of him that he act against it. Reality threatens man with death if he does not
act on his rational judgment; you threaten him with death if he does.

She decries an economic
system that puts the men “who deal, not in goods, but in favors” in charge. “When
you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion,” she prophesizes,

“when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission -
when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your
laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you
see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may
know that your society is doomed.”

In Atlas Shrugged, Rand tells the story of John Gault, a “maker” who gives
his society what it deserves, the full and unreserved evacuation of all its
producers and contributors. No doubt, tens of thousands of “makers” who feel
themselves abused for their success have felt the impulse to “Go Gault” on the
societies that have criticized them for that success. These are the people who
this film takes time to interview. One gets the sense that if the tea party
ever gets to set up its own government, its flag will have a picture of Atlas
dropping the world.

Question for Comment: Do you think the “maker v. taker” contrast is a
legitimate one? Or are all of us both, or potentially both?

02/05/2013

“I hadn’t realized I was so ignorant, Celie.
The little I knew about my own self wouldn’t have filled a thimble! And to
think Miss Beasley always said I was the smartest child she ever taught! But
one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading
and studying and writing a clear hand. And for keeping alive in me somehow the
desire to know.”

Last week one of
my students was assigned the task of reading The Color Purple by his sending school so I thought it no better
time to make my way through it. Among the issues covered in the book that will
no doubt get it high ranking on the annual “most-likely to be banned by
conservatives list” are the following: Vulgar language, explicit sexual
references, incest, rape, wife-beating, adultery, lesbianism, drug use, alcoholism,
murder, bad grammar, black dialects, domestic violence, controversial religious
beliefs (i.e. disparagement of conventional church Christianity), racism, dysfunctional
families, FGM, racial stereotypes, and mental illness. Have I forgotten
anything?

I suspect that Robert Bork might
refer to this sort of literature in the curriculum as “slouching towards Gomorrah”
but there is nothing here that will not in some way be part of the lives of the
people students today will someday know, work with, and maybe even marry. Maybe
it is best to face life in its darker corners before life mugs you and drags
you there? That’s the argument for this sort of literature anyway. I do think
that it should be a parental decision for the most part (there is so much here
to trigger-traumatize a kid with any of this stuff in their past) but that is neither
here nor there.

So what might be the value of a book
like The Color Purple? Perhaps the
obvious answer is that its primary character starts out her life as unlikely to
make it to a happy adulthood as one can possibly imagine. As she makes it,
students reading the novel might be inclined to say “I can make it.” The
curtain opens on her already deeply enmeshed in domestic violence and sexual abuse.
If dirt had a self image lower or hope more blighted than Celie, it would go to
therapy or kill itself. Her life she reflects is worse than being buried
because if she was buried, she “wouldn’t have to work.” This
is how she describes her step father.

“He look at me.
It like he looking at the earth. ‘It need somethin’ his eyes say.”

Celie is so poor
and neglected she “can’t remember being the first one in [her] own dress.”
Sometimes, the only way she can survive the traumas of her young life is to
dissociate (“I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree”). If love
were light, Celie would live on the backside of Pluto. “One good thing bout the
way he never do any work round the place,” she says of her step father, “us
never miss him when he gone.” Imagine if your only caregiver brought home his
mistress and upon meeting you, exclaimed that you were uglier than she had been
told you were. (“You sure is ugly, she say, like she ain’t believed it.”)
Imagine being beaten because you were not the person your primary caregiver
loved. (“What he beat you for? she ast. For being me and not you.”). Imagine
that the only female companionship you have is someone who has grown up with
the same abuse you have.

"Good
behavior ain’t good enough for them, say Sofia. Nothing less than sliding on
your belly with your tongue on they boots can even git they attention. I dream
of murder, she say, I dream of murder sleep or wake.”

Here is what
Celie’s sister says about growing up in their abusive household as she reflects
back on it from her new home in an African village as a missionary.

“There
is a way that the men speak to women that reminds me too much of Pa. They
listen just long enough to issue instructions. They don’t even look at women
when women are speaking. They look at the ground and bend their heads toward
the ground. The women also do not “look in a man’s face” as they say. To “look
in a man’s face” is a brazen thing to do. They look instead at his feet or his
knees. And what can I say to this? Again, it is our own behavior around Pa.”

In many ways, by
introducing us to a character who comes from a life so devoid of nurture and so
full of brutality, Alice Walker provides the reader with a roadmap out that
others along that road may have to travel. The Color Purple tells us what a
person needs to climb out of the hole their fates have put them in. Was your
own family a hive of whack jobs? Here is your Alice Walker approved purple
knapsack full of maps and compasses to get you out. Celie’s “salvation” comes
from a slow but sure realization that with her hardships, she has been given
assets and a series of “helpers” – her sister Nettie, her in-law Sophie, her
idol, Shug, and her transformed idea of God.

“There is so
much we don’t understand,” Celie’s sister Nettie says in one of her letters
towards the end of the book, “And so much unhappiness comes because of that.” This
may well be the theme of the book. Each of Celie’s “helpers” gives her some
crucial bit of understanding in the course of the novel – understandings that
prove crucial to her development as a character and to her liberation from the
tyranny of her circumstances into what is never exactly a “Good House Keeping”
life but certainly one that is lived with strength, affection, and dignity.

Nettie helps her
to believe that she is not who she has thought she was and that her children
are alive and well and that she does not come from a doomed union. Nettie informs her that her children are not
dead and that her step father is not her biological father. Nettie tells her in
her letters that it okay for her to stop internalizing the abuse.

(“The
world is changing, I said. It is no longer a world just for boys and men.”)

Sophia helps her
to understand that it is possible not only to stop letting men control one’s
own thoughts but also to stand up to their bullying. Sophia models what it
might be like to stand up to men, though she is not terribly successful at it. Sophia,
with a little help from “squeak” is the one that convinces Celie that women can
be powerful personalities in their own right and that they have voices and can
have boundaries.

(“She
say, All my life I had to fight. I had to fight my daddy. I had to fight my
brothers. I had to fight my cousins and my uncles. A girl child ain’t safe in a
family of men. But I never thought I’d have to fight in my own house. She let
out her breath. I loves Harpo, she say. God knows I do. But I’ll kill him dead
before I let him beat me. . . .

You
got to fight them, Celie, she say. I can’t do it for you. You got to fight them
for yourself.”)

Shug provides
her with an understanding of herself as a woman - As a person of value and not
simply a doormat (“First time somebody made something and name it after me.”). Shug
helps her to understand that bad things in life do not have to be permanent (“That
dog of a stepdaddy just a bad odor passing through.”) Shugs informs her of what
it means to be in one’s own skin and to own one’s own body. Shug helps her to
understand that she has skills that will allow her to move out from the
protection/abuse of her abusive marriage. Shug is also the one that helps Celie
to understand that God may not be who she has been raised to think He is, a
transformation that becomes crucial to her ability to rise above the
self-imposed racism of her childhood faith. “It is the pictures in the bible
that fool you,” Shug informs Celie,

“The
pictures that illustrate the words. All of the people are white and so you just
think all the people from the bible were white too. But really white white
people lived somewhere else during those times.”

When Celie
finally stands up to the tyranny and tyrants in her life, she does it with
style and in the presence of her “helpers”

“Until
you do right by me, everything you touch will crumble” she says to her husband.

“He laugh. Who you think you is? he say. You
can’t curse nobody. Look at you. You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman.
Goddam, he say, you nothing at all.”

“Until
you do right by me, I say, [Celie continues] everything you even dream about
will fail. I give it to him straight, just like it come to me. And it seem to
come to me from the trees.”

No doubt
evangelicals will object to the fact that Celie moves away from a faith that
looks like theirs and towards a faith that looks a lot like Buddhism. But
everyone can celebrate the idea that a person has a right to come to their own
understanding of how they relate to the divine in the universe and how they
will understand God as they define God. For Celie (and for Alice Walker) the
right to articulate a view of the universe that does not enslave you may be the
fundamental right of all the rights (there may be a reason why it is listed
first in the American Bill of Rights). This subject, Walker writes in the
preface, is the principle theme of the novel. “WHATEVER ELSE The Color Purple
has been taken for during the years since its publication,” she writes there,

“it
remains for me the theological work examining the journey from the religious
back to the spiritual that I spent much of my adult life, prior to writing it,
seeking to avoid. Having recognized myself as a worshiper of Nature by the age
of eleven, because my spirit resolutely wandered out the window to find trees
and wind during Sunday sermons, I saw no reason why, once free, I should bother
with religious matters at all.”

“This
is the book in which I was able to express a new spiritual awareness, a rebirth
into strong feelings of Oneness I realized I had experienced and taken for
granted as a child; a chance for me as well as the main character, Celie, to
encounter That Which Is Beyond Understanding But Not Beyond Loving and to say:
I see and hear you clearly, Great Mystery, now that I expect to see and hear
you everywhere I am, which is the right place.”

Because of its
importance, I feel it appropriate to quote the novel at length: “I don’t write to
God no more. I write to you,” Celie writes to her missionary sister in Africa
at one pivotal point in the novel,

“What
happen to God? ast Shug. Who that? I say. She look at me serious. Big a devil
as you is, I say, you not worried bout no God, surely. She say, Wait a minute.
Hold on just a minute here. Just because I don’t harass it like some peoples us
know don’t mean I ain’t got religion. What God do for me? I ast. She say,
Celie! Like she shock. He gave you life, good health, and a good woman that
love you to death. ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘and he give me a lynched daddy, a crazy
mama, a lowdown dog of a step pa and a sister I probably won’t ever see again.’
Anyhow, I say, the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just
like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgitful and lowdown. She say, Miss
Celie, You better hush. God might hear you. Let ’im hear me, I say. If he ever
listened to poor colored women the world would be a different place, I can tell
you. She talk and she talk, trying to budge me way from blasphemy. But I
blaspheme much as I want to. All my life I never care what people thought bout
nothing I did, I say. But deep in my heart I care about God. What he going to
think. And come to find out, he don’t think. Just sit up there glorying in
being deef, I reckon. But it ain’t easy, trying to do without God. Even if you
know he ain’t there, trying to do without him is a strain.

“You
telling me God love you, and you ain’t never done nothing for him? I mean, not
go to church, sing in the choir, feed the preacher and all like that? But if
God love me, Celie, I don’t have to do all that. Unless I want to. There’s a
lot of other things I can do that I speck God likes. Like what? I ast. Oh, she
say. I can lay back and just admire stuff. Be happy. Have a good time. Well,
this sound like blasphemy sure nuff. She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you
ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for
him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think
all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.
Some folks didn’t have him to share, I said.”

“They
the ones didn’t speak to me while I was there struggling with my big belly and
Mr. children. Right, she say. Then she say: Tell me what your God
look like, Celie. Aw naw, I say. I’m too shame. Nobody ever ast me this before,
so I’m sort of took by surprise. Besides, when I think about it, it don’t seem
quite right. But it all I got. I decide to stick up for him, just to see what
Shug say. Okay, I say. He big and old and tall and graybearded and white. He
wear white robes and go barefooted. Blue eyes? she ast. Sort of bluish-gray.
Cool. Big though. White lashes. I say. She laugh. Why you laugh? I ast. I don’t
think it so funny. What you expect him to look like, Mr. _____ ? That wouldn’t
be no improvement, she say. Then she tell me this old white man is the same God
she used to see when she prayed. If you wait to find God in church, Celie, she
say, that’s who is bound to show up, cause that’s where he live. How come? I
ast. Cause that’s the one that’s in the white folks’ white bible. Shug! I say.
God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it. How come he look
just like them, then? she say. Only bigger? And a heap more hair. How come the
bible just like everything else they make, all about them doing”

“Here’s
the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside
everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for
it inside find it.”

“She
say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then
other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a
motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of
everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed.
And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it
was.”

“I
think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere
and don’t notice it." [Ergo the title “The
Color Purple”]

I suspect that
the critics of the Color Purple would prefer that Celie find her salvation in a
good church and not in Buddhism; That she find her orientation in
heterosexuality and not homosexuality; That she find stability in a traditional
family not in separation and divorce and a common-law marriage – slash – civil union
with a woman that runs off with 19 year olds. And I suspect that they would
prefer that Celie be somewhat of a less defiant heroine. But ultimately this is
not and never was intended to be a story about a woman who becomes heroic by
conforming to a cultural ideal (in her culture, that would have made her a pair
of dirty boots.)

This is a story about someone whose “little whistle sound like
it lost way down in a jar, and the jar in the bottom of the creek.” (“Mr. _____
feelings hurt, I say. I don’t mention mine.”) This is a story about a woman who
begins to make her journey towards belief in herself as being worthy of love.
And there are many rest areas on that highway as I suspect that we all know. “There
is so much we don’t understand. And so much unhappiness comes because of that.”

To those who
would argue that Celie has not come far enough towards healing by the end of
the story, I would only say, miracles sometimes take a lifetime. I am not sure
that Alice Walker ever insinuates that Celie has arrived. Se mearly asserts
that to arrive, we must all set out.

Question for Comment:
Have you ever been “set free” in your life? When did it happen? Who were your
helpers?

02/04/2013

George Washington Plunkitt, for those of
you who may not recall from your U.S. History classes, was the quintessential “party
boss” in New York City a hundred years ago. He made a business out of
government and a good business at that. In an era long before blogs and
facebook, he was a master at the art of assembling “a following.” He began his
career as a young man by assembling a voting block of two (himself and a friend
who he knew would vote any way that G.W. Plunkitt told him to). He expanded
this original “George Washington Plunkitt Association” to an entire apartment
house and block and kept right on building until he could walk into a political
machine and promise to deliver thousands of votes.

With that promise, he built himself an
empire where valuable political favors were arbitraged for voting blocks. He
never cared much about national issues or moral issues or platform issues. He
made the astute assertion that the masses of New York City could care less
about the acquisition of the Philippines or the worth of silver relative to gold
or the implications of a war in Cuba. What they cared about was the knowledge
that there was someone powerful who could take care of them when they needed
cared for. Plunkitt provided that “care” in exchange for their loyalty on
election days and cemented that social contract with a thousand favors. If
there was a fire, Plunkitt or his lieutenants were there to help. If someone
lost a job, Plunkitt was there to give them another. If someone died, Plunkitt
was at the funeral. No act of charity was below him in his quest to own the
vote of New York City. Votes were his “marketable commodity” as he put it.

“After forty
years’ experience at the game I am – well, I’m George Washington Plunkitt.
Everybody knows what figure I cut in the greatest organization on earth, and if
you hear people say that I’ve laid away a million or so since I was a butcher’s
boy in Washington Market, don’t come to me for an indignant denial. I’m pretty
comfortable, thank you.”

If you needed steel, you went to Andrew
Carnegie. If you needed oil, you went to John D. Rockefeller. If you needed
money, you went to J.P. Morgan. If you needed votes, you came to George
Washington Plunkitt. By his own admission, he was a “force” to be reckoned with
in any political contest. In an era where governments had almost nothing to
offer the needy, the needy understood that they could parlay their loyal votes
for something by channeling them through people like Plunkitt who understood
that loyalty could only be paid with loyalty. “Poll-going for Patronage” was
the motto of his business. “Every good man looks after his friends,” he
insisted, “and any man who doesn't isn't likely to be popular.” There’s only
one way to hold a district,” he added,

“You must study
human nature and act accordin’. You can’t study human nature in books. Books is
a hindrance more than anything else. If you have been to college, so much the
worse for you. You’ll have to unlearn all you learned before you can get right
down to human nature, and unlearnin’ takes a lot of time. Some men can never
forget what they learned at college. Such men may get to be district leaders by
a fluke, but they never last. To learn real human nature you have to go among
the people, see them and be seen.”

What tells in holdin’ your grip on your district is
to go right down among the poor families and help them in the different ways
they need help. I’ve got a regular system for this. If there’s a fire in Ninth,
Tenth, or Eleventh Avenue, for example, any hour of the day or night, I’m
usually there with some of my election district captains as soon as the fire
engines. If a family is burned out I don’t ask whether they are Republicans or
Democrats, and I don’t refer them to the Charity Organization Society, which
would investigate their case in a month or two and decide they were worthy of
help about the time they are dead from starvation. I just get quarters for
them, buy clothes for them if their clothes were burned up, and fix them up
till they get things runnin’ again. It’s philanthropy, but it’s politics, too –
mighty good politics. Who can tell how many votes one of these fires bring me?
The poor are the most grateful people in the world, and, let me tell you, they
have more friends in their neighborhoods than the rich have in theirs.

If there’s a family in my district in want I know
it before the charitable societies do, and me and my men are first on the
ground. I have a special corps to look up such cases. The consequence is that
the poor look up to George W. Plunkitt as a father, come to him in trouble –
and don’t forget him on election day.

Another thing, I can always get a job for a
deservin’ man. I make it a point to keep on the track of jobs, and it seldom
happens that I don’t have a few up my sleeve ready for use. I know every big
employer in the district and in the whole city, for that matter, and they ain’t
in the habit of sayin’ no to me when I ask them for a job.

And the children – the little roses of the
district! Do I forget them? Oh, no! They know me, every one of them, and they
know that a sight of Uncle George and candy means the same thing. Some of them
are the best kind of vote-getters. I’ll tell you a case. Last year a little Eleventh
Avenue rosebud, whose father is a Republican, caught hold of his whiskers on
election day and said she wouldn’t let go till he’d promise to vote for me. And
she didn’t.”

When George Plunkitt was asked to give
young men interested in political careers advice, he insisted that going to
college would be the last thing to do. “In fact, a young man who has gone
through the college course is handicapped at the outset,” he said, “He may
succeed in politics, but the chances are 100 to 1 against him.” “We got bookworms,”
he said of his organization, “But we don’t make them district leaders. We keep
them for ornaments on parade days.” “If we were bookworms and college
professors,” he continued, “Tammany might win an election once in four thousand
years.” Thus, studying to be an orator (like William Jennings Bryan) was not
likely to get you anywhere either, he noted. And trying to sound more
intelligent than the constituents was a sign of political retardation.

“As for the
common people of the district, I am at home with them at all times. When I go
among them, I don’t try to show off my grammar, or talk about the Constitution,
or how many volts there is in electricity or make it appear in any way that I
am better educated than they are. They wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing.
No; I drop all monkeyshines. So you see, I’ve got to be several sorts of a man
in a single day, a lightnin’ change artist, so to speak. But I am one sort of
man always in one respect: I stick to my friends high and low, do them a good
turn whenever I get a chance, and hunt up all the jobs going for my
constituents. There ain’t a man in New York who’s got such a scent for
political jobs as I have. When I get up in the mornin’ I can almost tell every
time whether a job has become vacant over night, and what department it’s in
and I’m the first man on the ground to get it.”

“Make ‘the poorest man in your district
feel that he is your equal, or even a bit superior to you,” Plunkitt advises.

“Another thing
that people won’t stand for is showin’ off your learnin’. That’s just puttin’
on style in another way. If you’re makin’ speeches in a campaign, talk the
language the people talk. Don’t try to show how the situation is by quotin’
Shakespeare. Shakespeare was all right in his way, but he didn’t know anything
about Fifteenth District politics. If you know Latin and Greek and have a
hankerin’ to work them off on somebody, hire a stranger to come to your house
and listen to you for a couple of hours; then go out and talk the language of
the Fifteenth to the people. I know it’s an awful temptation, the hankerin’ to
show off your learnin’. I’ve felt it myself, but I always resist it. I know the
awful consequences.”

Success in politics he preached, came
down to the cultivation of loyal relationships and the assembly of a devoted “following.”
Plunkitt’s “machine” could win elections. It did not matter so much to him who
got elected (so long as they did not favor civil service reform). To G.W. Plunkitt, Civil Service reform (the
regulation of politics so that party bosses such as himself would not be able
to offer jobs and political favors for votes) would spell the end of the
electoral process itself. For indeed, who would work to get anyone elected if
it were not for some bone that victory would grant THEM? “How are you going to
interest our young men in their country if you have no offices to grant them?”
he asked incredulously.

“When the people
elected Tammany, they knew just what they were doin’. We didn’t put up any
false pretenses. We didn’t go in for humbug civil service and all that rot. We
stood as we have always stood, for reward – in’ the men that won the victory.
They call that the spoils system. All right; Tammany is for the spoils system,
and when we go in we fire every anti-Tammany man from office that can be fired
under the law. It’s an elastic sort of law and you can bet it will be stretched
to the limit.”

“No Tammany man went hungry” in his
district, he promised in this America before Social Security and unemployment
benefits. The Civil Service laws, he
insisted, were “sappin the foundations of patriotism all over the country.” It
is not difficult to see that Plunkitt’s spirit lives on today:

“You
read constantly that banks are lobbying regulators and elected officials as if
this is inappropriate. We don't look at it that way.” Jamie Dimon, Chief executive Officer at J.P. Morgan

Read selections of George Washington
Plunkitt’s thoughts about “honest graft” and his philosophy of politics yourself
HERE.

Questions
for Comment:
Plunkitt asserts that people are essentially self-serving creatures and that it
is a “silly morality” that would expect them to be otherwise. He “sees his
opportunities and he takes em” and he expects that he is no different from
anyone else in that regard. He is just better at it than most. What do you think?
Do you think that people can be depended upon to be “patriotic” if there isn’t “something
in it for them”?